ECERC: Evidence-Cause Attention Network for Multi-Modal Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Multi-modal Emotion Recognition in Conversation (MMERC) aims to identify speakers' emotional states using multi-modal conversational data, significant for various domains. MMERC requires addressing emotional causes: contextual factors that influence emotions, alongside emotional evidence directly expressed in the target utterance. Existing methods primarily model general conversational dependencies, such as sequential utterance relationships or inter-speaker dynamics, but fall short in capturing diverse and detailed emotional causes, including emotional contagion, influences from others, and self-referenced or externally introduced events. To address these limitations, we propose the Evidence-Cause Attention Network for Multi-Modal Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ECERC). ECERC integrates emotional evidence with contextual causes through five stages: Evidence Gating extracts and refines emotional evidence across modalities; Cause Encoding captures causes from conversational context; Evidence-Cause Interaction uses attention to integrate evidence with diverse causes, generating rich candidate features for emotion inference; Feature Gating adaptively weights contributions of candidate features; and Emotion Classification classifies emotions. We evaluate ECERC on two widely used benchmark datasets, IEMOCAP and MELD. Experimental results show that ECERC achieves competitive performance in weighted F1-score and accuracy, demonstrating its effectiveness in MMERC 1 .